ArcBest Corporation (NASDAQ:ARCB) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Steven Leonard : Yeah. So, if you take out kind of the disruption that we’re seeing in the demand, that’s coming from that and just look at, kind of where business was and what we were seeing seasonally. We are not seeing a drastic change in demand, there are pockets of customers in certain industries that are maybe seeing more demand than others, but in general, nothing game changing from a demand perspective? Yeah, aside from the disruption, which, with those customers, we’re well positioned a lot of those customers, we have relationships with them. And they’re coming to us looking for solutions. And with our capability set, a lot of times, we’re able to respond in a way that gives them more options than otherwise, we’re just looking at our asset base capacity.

So, we’re in a great position there. And we’re seeing that play out. We’ve had some good examples where customers are coming to us looking for capacity, we’re able to optimize that business, use, all of our relationships, and that’s really playing out well for our customers.

Operator: The next question is coming from the line of Jason Seidl with Cowen, please go ahead.

Jason Seidl: Thank you, operator, Judy, David team. Good morning.

Judy McReynolds : Good morning.

Jason Seidl: Wanted to focus a little bit on sort of the free coming into the network and, and how you think that’ll evolve over time, if there is a full-fledged bankruptcy that everyone seems to be thinking, Yellow. And what I mean by that is everything’s just coming in now. But what you take on today not, might not be what you sort of maintaining your system? So, how do you think about that? How do you think about pricing that freight over time? And then maybe any thoughts on anyone in the industry trying to push through another GRI sometime between now and the end of the year?

Judy McReynolds : Well, Jason, I think we have to be mindful of many things, as we’re looking at this business. It’s, it’s always interesting to us to see the opportunities that arise in certain situations. And what’s interesting is, many of the customers, that we’re having conversations with daily, or maybe intraday, these are, these are opportunities that we’ve seen before. Sometimes it’s about the lanes that work well with for us, or some other aspect or element of it. And we’ve got to kind of sort through that and make sure that we feel really good about it being an incrementally good decision for us. And I think we do that fairly well. We’ve talked about wanting to be able to look back at that after we’ve been experiencing that business for some period of time.

And maybe perhaps it operates a little bit differently than we thought, and we can revisit that either to respond, where we’re doing more of that with the customer, or perhaps even less of that with the customer. We do feel pretty informed, I’d say. And Christopher in terms of GRI. I think our last year, I was in November of last year. I don’t know that there’s been many discussions about that. And we’re typically not a leader. We typically watch what happens, but would you add anything to that?

Christopher Adkins: That’s running generally, the market takes about one year, per year, as Judy mentioned, we took ours last November is something we’re constantly evaluating in watching the marketplace and what others are doing in this area?

Jason Seidl: Good. And a quick follow up, Judy, what lessons did you learn from any prior major bankruptcies in the LTL space? And so, what do you think you can do different this time to be more nimble and agile?

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